The word justice is frequently thrown around, but not often understood. When will people come to realize that, through every act of abortion, a child is brutally murdered? Our selfish and "me" society teaches people that this act is acceptable, and certainly not one that should be spoken out against. We must right this wrong, and put our nation back on a path of respecting and valuing all life. Too many have suffered already.

Few may have taken note of the blatant error in President Obama's recent remarks on the occasion of Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech, but the irony in Obama's rhetoric struck me like a sword to the heart. In his speech Obama said, "We may never duplicate the swelling crowds and dazzling procession of that day so long ago – no one can match King's brilliance – but the same flame that lit the heart of all who are willing to take a first step of justice, I know that flame remains."

The use of the word "justice" by a man who embraces all manner of killing the innocent preborn is so contradictory to the meaning of the word that it defies logic and reason. And yet amidst the applause, the media accolades, and the sappy comments from those who heard Obama, there is this kernel of reality: Far too many Americans are blind to the facts. They are unwilling to see the contradictions and the bloody truth of it all. Such people do not seem to be capable of seeing through the veil that masks what has become an acceptable practice in this nation – the wholesale killing of babies before birth or, as we recently learned, immediately after birth.

Americans – black, white, yellow, and red – who honestly want to live in a nation of just laws and justice for all would not be capable of tolerating the wholesale destruction of an entire class of people simply because they are not yet born. But yet that is exactly what is occurring on a daily basis in this nation. Thousands of people die every day because of chemical assaults on their young bodies, clinical acts of destruction, and surgical procedures that render living human beings dead. It is called abortion – and it is anything but just.

The callous disregard for human life that has all but destroyed the principles on which this nation was founded does not appear to affect daily living for most Americans, and yet it is slowly but surely starving the life out of this nation.

Dennis Howard, founder of Movement for a Better America, wrote an analysis of the economic woes this nation faces after more than 55 million surgical abortions. In it, he said:

55 million abortions is equivalent to the population of our 73 largest cities, from New York all the way down to cities the size of Chandler, AZ.

That's the toll [surgical] abortion has already reached at the current rate of over 1,200,000 abortions a year. It's equal to or greater than the human loss we would have experienced from an all-out nuclear war. Yet we are told to sit passively by and endure it by the pro-abortion ideologues of the left who dominate our culture, our media, our politics and our courts.

It adds up to a 30 percent loss in the younger generation under age 45. The toll includes some 18 million African American babies and 37 million others. That's about 3,585 times as many African Americans as were lynched since the Civil War. It amounts to a holocaust against blacks and against the young. It is the greatest loss ever inflicted on any generation in history.

How can anyone with a conscience stand silent in the face of it?

One has to conclude, whether fashionable to say so or not, that abortion is like cancer. The more it spreads, the more it debilitates until, if left untreated, it ultimately destroys the body politic. And then one day in the not too distant future, the land of the free will become a footnote in history. The United States, that great experiment in democracy, founded on a system of just laws, will be remembered as the nation that blindly ate itself alive – one baby's life at a time.

Judie Brown

Judie Brown is president and co-founder of American Life League, the nation's largest grassroots pro-life educational organization... (more)

Judie Brown is president and co-founder of American Life League, the nation's largest grassroots pro-life educational organization.

She has served three terms as a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life in Rome. Daily Catholic cited her as one of the top 100 Catholics of the 20th century.

Judie has appeared on 20/20, 60 Minutes, Mother Angelica Live, The O'Reilly Factor, Good Morning America, Today, Oprah, and Larry King Live, as well as hundreds of other television and radio talk shows. Her comments regularly appear in major print media nationwide, and she has written numerous editorial pieces for magazines and newspapers, including The Washington Post and USA Today.

Judie is married to Paul A. Brown, and they have three children and nine grandchildren. She and her husband have been involved in the pro-life movement since 1969.